Courses Recommended for First-Years

CPLT BC3001: Introduction to Comparative Literature

E. Sun

M/W 11:40-12:55

Introduction to methods and topics in the study of literature across national, linguistic, and cultural boundaries, across historical periods, and in relation to other arts and disciplines. Readings are selected and juxtaposed in consecutive units designed to give students training in the practice of comparative criticism and to foster, through praxis, reflection on underlying theoretical and methodological questions. We will study works of poetry, drama, prose fiction, theory, and criticism. Topics include: the role of language and literature in different cultures and historical periods, the relationship between genres, the circulation of literary forms, literature and translation, post-colonial literature; East-West literary relations, the relationship of literature to other arts, and the relationship between literature and theory.

CPLS BC3140: Europe Imagined: Images of the New Europe in 20th-Century Literature​ (CANCELLED)

E. Grimm

T/R 10:10-11:25

Recommended for First-Year Students

Compares the diverse images of Europe in 20th-century literature, with an emphasis on the forces of integration and division that shape cultural identity in the areas of travel writings and transculturation/cosmopolitanism; mnemonic narratives and constructions of the past; borderland stories and the cultural politics of translation. Readings include M. Kundera, S. Rushdie, H. Boell, C. Toibin and others.

CPLS BC3144: Stories and Storytelling: Introduction to Narrative

E. Sun

T/R 4:10-5:25

Recommended for First-Year Students

Study of the forms and functions of narrative through engagement with the modes of detection, confession, and digression. You will examine how storytelling takes place in various media and genres and across fiction and non-fiction, studying short stories, a novella, novels, a poem, films, scholarly essays, autobiography, and a psychoanalytic case history. Attention to cultural differences, historical shifts, and philosophical questions such as the writing of the self, the nature of memory, the experience of time, and the relationship of truth to fiction. Readings include Doyle, Borges, Sophocles, Freud, Hitchcock, Augustine, Coleridge, McEwan, the compilers of The Arabian Nights, Diderot, Calvino, and Lispector.

CPLS BC3161: Myths of Oedipusin Western Drama and Philosophy (NEW!!!)

C. Weber

M/W 2:40-3:55

Recommended for First-Year Students

This course examines the myth of Oedipus in a range of dramatic and theoretical writings, exploring how the paradigm of incest and parricide has shaped Western thought from classical tragedy to gender studies. Authors studied: Sophocles, Seneca, Corneille, Dryden, Voltaire, Hölderlin, Hegel, Wagner, Nietzsche, Freud, Klein, Deleuze, Guattari, and Butler.